They were Hollywood’s perfect pair, relics from the Golden Age. Through
twenty-five years and eight films, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn
had refined a remarkable chemistry, one a yin to the other’s yang. Tracy:
the rumpled Irish pug, the snowy-haired Everyman, the iron-willed champion of the human spirit. Hepburn: the blue-blood scion of a Connecticut
doctor and a liberal activist, the regal product of Bryn Mawr and Old
Money, the pants-wearing, tennis-playing emblem of female independence. Tracy was the grumpy hero, Hepburn his sovereign alter ego. On
screen, they rarely touched, let alone kissed. But through jokes and arguments and glances, they conveyed an appealing mutual respect. They were
the Great American Couple.1

Off-screen, their partnership was less ideal. In 1941, while shooting Woman of the Year, they began a rocky affair. Tracy—filled with selfloathing, tormented by Catholic guilt, plagued by insomnia—treated her
with cold silences and cruel outbursts. He drank hard and often. Hepburn
weathered, even welcomed, the abuse. She had a romantic weakness for
troubled souls, and she fussed over Tracy. In their early days together,
Hepburn sometimes curled asleep outside his hotel door, while Tracy sat
inside with a case of Irish whiskey, blind drunk and stark naked.2

Their romance endured through State of the Union and Adam’s Rib
and Desk Set, Tracy periodically chastening himself for betraying his
marriage vows, Hepburn continually sacrificing her independence. She
embraced her old age; he grumbled that he was the last of his tribe. By the
late 1950s she was preserving his career, lobbying John Ford (Hepburn’s
former lover and Tracy’s former mentor) for the lead in The Last Hurrah.
She also nursed Tracy’s myriad ills from a lifetime of drinking.3

Tracy had another cheerleader: Stanley Kramer, who produced and
directed the Tracy films Inherit the Wind (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg
(1961), and It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963). Like Poitier, Kramer

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